Red Hat announced the public beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud and changes the economics of computing by allowing customers to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use.

Today, customers can visit www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud to subscribe to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-demand. Subscriptions include a supported infrastructure and operating system from Red Hat and Amazon Web Services, purchasable by the hour. Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud provides the same management, partner certifications and software as other Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings, permitting customers to deploy a consistent environment both on-premise and within the cloud, while retaining the same familiar tools and processes.

Subscriptions to the beta are $19 per month, per account for access to support and services. Once subscribed, customers may instantiate small, large or extra-large server instances on the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment at $0.21, $0.53 and $0.94 per hour respectively. Any bandwidth usage or additional storage will be billed at additional per GB rates.